Tag: Vancouver Island

Pebbles

Posted on by David Greer

by David Greer

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour. —William Blake, from “Auguries of Innocence”

I count among my simple pleasures a walk to a pocket beach not far from my home. Tucked between a couple of small headlands, barely 100 yards long, it overlooks Juan de Fuca Strait, separating Vancouver Island from Washington’s Olympic Peninsula to the south. It’s a quiet spot, empty of the summer crowds that flock to beaches elsewhere in the city, and for that reason a treasured refuge for readers and romantics in search of solitude with a tranquil view of snowy peaks. There’s always the possibility of sighting a pod of the killer whales that frequent these waters.

Casual strollers and swimmers prefer the city’s sandy beaches. The shape of pocket beaches like the one I frequent invites tidal scouring that washes sand away, leaving only pebbles, some of which may one day be ground to sand as well, though likely not in our lifetimes or those of our grandchildren. Geological change moves slowly, except when it doesn’t.

Rapid geological change is rare and, given the propensity of humans to occupy even the remoter parts of the planet, invites casualties. One of the most dramatic such changes in recent times occurred in 1980, when Mount St. Helens, in western Washington state, blew its top one fine spring day, filling the skies with half a billion tons of rock and ash and instantly and dramatically reshaping the surrounding landscape, including by radically relocating the course of a major river. One of the consequences of the event was the establishment of the Mount St. Helens Creation Center, one of a number of “creation science” museums dedicated to the proposition that all creatures great and small, as well as the planet they inhabit, were created in a matter of days a few thousand years ago and not through the course of a few billion years of gradual evolution. What better evidence than a landscape reborn in moments? Read more »

Monday, July 4, 2022

Swainson’s Thrush and the Sockeye Moon

Posted on by David Greer

by David Greer

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
—Excerpt from The Lake Isle of Innisfree, by William Butler Yeats

Our people lived as part of everything. We were so much a part of nature, we were just like the birds, the animals, the fish. We were like the mountains. Our people lived that way. We knew there was an intelligence, a strength, a power, far beyond ourselves…. Everybody had the right to comfort, to security, the right to food, a home, the use of the land. This is because we believed that everything was put here by a great and wonderful intelligence.
—Excerpt from Saltwater People, by Dave Elliott

Pacific tree frog. Photo by David Greer.

Visitors to my cabin in a forest glade on a small island in the Salish Sea almost always remark upon the silence. It’s true, if you’re freshly arrived from an urban community, the silence at first seems absolute and a little overwhelming. It’s only when you quiet yourself that the silence surrounding you starts to come alive with the texture and colour of natural sounds.

Some sounds may seem easily identifiable to visitors if only because their creators are visible. The slow thunk-thunk-thunk of a raven’s wings beating the air as it passes arrow-straight across the circle of blue sky over the glade. The chittering of a bald eagle high in a fir. The cat-like mew of a red-eyed spotted towhee rooting through underbrush. Other noises require more careful observation and familiarity but are instantly identifiable to those who know them. The faint scrape of the jaws of a yellowjacket backing down a cedar post, a grey ball of nest paper slowly enlarging beneath its mandibles. The lazy kre-e-e-eck? deep in a cedar, like a creaking rusty door in a haunted house: the territorial call of a male Pacific tree frog, gold and green and shadow-secluded. The urgent whistling of a juvenile barred owl, harassing its parent for freshly killed flesh. And in the gloaming, not the soft sound of the linnet’s wings, but those of its close cousin the house finch in this part of the world six thousand miles from Yeats country. Read more »